The Endless Disaster

The 2002 Prestige oil spill was far more costly than even Exxon Valdez. And though her fate was predictable, the tale of her final days offers lessons for the BP fiasco.ON THE POLITICS BLOG:Constant Updates on the Gulf Oil Spill >>

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Originally published in the November 2003 issue

THE WORLD USED TO END on a finger of stones curled above the surf or maybe just beyond, out past the shallows, at the sharp line where the sky met the sea and both fell away into nothing. In the near distance, there were fish and crabs and barnacles to be scraped from the boulders that poked above the spray, which is why people tethered themselves to the edge of the earth. But farther out, in the abyss, there were serpents and dragons and great huffing monsters.

Men vanished out there, set sail from tiny villages on the shoulder of Spain, from Caion and Corme and Cape Finisterre--the petite cape whose name literally means the end of the earth--and simply disappeared. Maybe they drowned, or maybe the current washed them over the horizon onto an Argentine beach. But they were gone either way, which is why the women left behind on the damp Galician coast came to be known as the brides of the dead and the widows of the living.

Out there, beyond the horizon, the winds howled and the seas churned and the waves gathered up into green-gray mountains that rushed toward the east and threw themselves against the rocks and over the walls and onto the fields. Long ago, it is said, the ocean rose in a sheet a hundred feet high and cleaved a whole city from a hill, and there is still a valley there to prove it. And down below, the surf is littered with the beams of a thousand ships wrecked by the storms that blew in from the west, so many that mariners came to call the entire Galician shoulder the Costa de la Muerte, the Death Coast.

Yet the skies would eventually clear and the seas would calm. The survivors would rebuild on the next hill and the farmers would replant the crops and the masons would raise another cross on the high bluffs. There was nothing else to do. There were dragons out there, and they would come again. And no one would ever see them until it was too late.

SHE WAS A TIRED OLD GIRL, MAYBE TOO WEARY AND worn to be lumbering through the November swells twenty-seven miles off Cape Finisterre, out there beyond the horizon in the waves and the wind. She'd been at sea for only seven days this time but sailing for twenty-six years altogether, twice as long as the average tanker, ever since the seventies, when she was called Gladys.

She'd been rechristened the Prestige, an odd and depressing name for such an old boat. Once, when she was new, it may have been fitting. She was big, twice as long as a football field and as wide as a city block, long and flat and the same dark, dull gray as a whale. A stepped white cube--the bridge, the crew quarters, the galley--rose six stories above the aft deck, and her tanks could carry more than twenty million gallons across the widest and wildest ocean. But that was long ago. The big oil companies wouldn't touch her anymore, and international shipping rules would force her to retire in just a little more than two years, in 2005, because her age and her single-walled hull made her too much of a risk. As it was, the United States wouldn't let her anywhere near its shores fully laden.

So she sailed for hire now, chartered for $13,000 a day to squeeze out the last dribs of profit before being butchered for scrap. She was currently the property of a one-ship Liberian-registered company, Mare Shipping, which happened to share a Monrovia office address with her Greek managers, Universe Maritime, which in turn put her to sea under a tax-free Bahamian flag. A year and a half before, Chinese workers had dry-docked her in Guangzhou, patched her up, stripped off steel sheeting fatigued by decades of pounding brine, and welded more than three hundred tons of fresh plating to her ribs along the starboard midships. Engineers from the American Bureau of Shipping had watched the repairs, then inspected the seams and the rest of her hull and said she was sound.

She'd spent most of the summer and fall docked in St. Petersburg, Russia, storing oil and supplies. At about the same time, an oil-brokerage firm named Crown Resources--incorporated in Switzerland and owned by the byzantine conglomerate of a young Russian robber baron named Mikhail Fridman--started looking for a tanker to haul a load of heavy fuel oil out of Latvia. It's awful stuff, barely more than the residual goo left after gasoline and kerosene and everything else have been refined from crude. There isn't much of a demand for it--that grade of fuel is suitable for only a few ancient engines and furnaces--and that particular load couldn't even be legally sold in the European Union; according to one laboratory analysis, it contained nearly three times more sulfur than is permitted under environmental law, as well as higher than usual concentrations of other suspected carcinogens. It's the kind of stuff that bubbles mostly at the fringe of the international petroleum trade, bought and sold in gray markets by jumbled holding companies and dressed-up rogues, carried from port to port by rented and weathered tankers.

The partially loaded Prestige left St. Petersburg on October 30, 2002, for the Latvian port of Ventspils, where the rest of her tanks were filled. She was now carrying about seventy-seven thousand metric tons of oil, about twice as much as the Exxon Valdez tried to carry out of Prince William Sound in 1989, and worth about $10 million. She stopped next along the Danish coast to take on fuel for her own engines and then, on November 7, set a southwesterly course for Gibraltar, where she would wait for a buyer and a final destination.

Two days out of Denmark, the winds started blowing harder from the west, which was neither unexpected nor especially worrisome. The North Atlantic is a notoriously surly place, especially in the colder months, when the warm waters of the Gulf Stream collide with the Labrador Current and frigid arctic winds, all of it tangling into ferocious gales and towering swells. Yet big ships like the Prestige are built to navigate heavy seas as a matter of routine; forty-three thousand of them steam around the Iberian Peninsula every year, a quarter of them filled with gas or oil or some other poison, and heave safely through the turbulent waves.

The captain of the Prestige was a seasoned sixty-seven-year-old Greek named Apostolos Mangouras, a man who'd been a tanker master since long before the beam of his ship had ever been laid. He was a slight figure--with his watch cap pulled down tight, he was a double for Burgess Meredith--but he knew how to handle a big ship. He kept her steady through the swells for three days, holding course for the center of the Bay of Biscay through a worsening storm. By midday on November 12, the gusts came more fiercely, blunt shears careening across the open ocean, pushing the surface into twenty-foot swells that rolled into the starboard side and lifted, tipped the ship hard to port, then sloshed across the deck. The old girl would rotate, lean to starboard, slide down the back side of the wave, and brace for the next one. The rhythm, irregular and broken, continued through the night and into the next day. The storm wasn't easing; if anything, it was getting more furious.

Mangouras ordered the engines pulled back, slowed the Prestige to barely four knots, a stable crawl. He watched from the bridge as a wave broke over the deck and the bow pivoted against the gray horizon, listing 20 degrees one way, hanging for an instant, then ricocheting 20 degrees the other way.

And then it was gone. Another wave attacked from starboard, exploded over the side. White foam and green sheets covered the deck, obscured the view.

There was a bang at midships and a bass shudder.

The spray collapsed onto the deck, fell back into the sea. Mangouras scanned the deck, looked out over all two hundred meters. The cargo lids, some of them, had broken loose from the tanks. Oil slopped from the holds, mixing with the waves, slicking the deck, spilling into the ocean.

Another lurch, this time to starboard, 5 degrees, then 10. She stayed there, twisted on the surface, tipping. Another swell passed. The Prestige leaned harder to her right. Mangouras couldn't see the damage from above, but he knew his ship was taking on water, most likely in the ballast tanks on the starboard wing, the ocean pouring in like deadweight. The Prestige rolled 25 degrees, and the engines stopped, automatically quit. She was adrift and listing in a North Atlantic storm.

Mangouras sounded the general alarm. A signal bounced up to a satellite, then down to rescue crews on shore, a standard maritime distress call--the name of the ship, her location, an SOS. The dispirited crew, mostly Filipinos, trained poorly and paid worse, mustered on deck. Mangouras thought he saw panic in their eyes. At a quarter past three in the afternoon, five minutes after the last big wave had washed across the Prestige, Mangouras keyed the radio. The words fractured in the storm, but the gist got through: Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Request immediate evacuation.

HELICOPTERS WHIRLED INTO THE STORM FROM LA Coruña, the major port city on the Galician coast, and turned into the wind, flying west over the sea. By five o'clock, they hovered over the bow, winching up sailors, twirling and frightened. They lifted two dozen of them from the bouncing deck during the next hour, quickly and efficiently, then spun back toward the shore.

Captain Mangouras stayed with his ship, along with his chief officer and chief engineer. The Prestige was still listing badly, waves hammering her starboard side, black oil oozing across her deck, but she wasn't in immediate danger of going under. With most of the crew safely ashore, Mangouras and his two aides were trying to get the ship righted, to bring her closer to an even keel so tugs could rope her under control. If the waves pounded her into the rocks, or if she rolled more heavily, she would hemorrhage her cargo across miles of delicate coastline.

After sounding the Mayday, he had ordered the port ballast tanks flooded with seawater to counterbalance the breach in the starboard side. She gradually sagged back toward level, the list reduced to 15 degrees, then 10, finally 8. But now the Prestige was badly overloaded, riding perilously low in the swells, her insides strained by the ballasting, the combined forces stressing her to 63 percent above her maximum designed tolerance. Mangouras had bought time, but not very much.

On shore in La Coruña, the Spanish authorities had no way of knowing how critically the Prestige had been wounded, whether she was already pouring oil from her hull or, as Mangouras maintained, only slopping a few gallons through the open covers on her deck. Yet they'd already determined that the ship had to be kept far from their shores. The Galician coast is one of the most bountiful fisheries in Europe, its near waters cultivated by thousands of small boats sailing from postcard villages. Nearly thirty thousand people make their living pulling sole and octopus from the sea or raking clams from the estuaries or dodging waves to pry goose barnacles from the cliffs. Those who don't fish depend on those who do or on the summer tourists who gather on the short curves of soft beach between the rocks. If the coast was fouled, the economy, already one of the most anemic on the continent, would wither.

It had happened before, a catastrophic spill, the last time just a decade earlier. In December of 1992, a tanker named the Aegean Sea crashed into the rocks below the Tower of Hercules, a stone lighthouse the Romans built in the second century at La Coruña. More than twenty-one million gallons of crude poured into the ocean and onto the shore, and then it burned and coughed up a black shroud two miles high that smothered the lighthouse on the bluff. It took the Galician fisheries nearly five years to rebound from that disaster.

Salvors were already chasing the Prestige. In La Coruña, a salvage firm called Technosub and its Dutch associate, Smit Salvage, were already talking with the Prestige's Greek managers, trying to secure a contract to rescue the ship and her $10 million cargo. And off the coast of Cape Finisterre, a stocky ocean tug named the Rio de Vigo was steaming into the storm toward the listing tanker. If the Vigo could make fast a line, she could pull against the tide and the waves and at least hold the Prestige away from the shore.

By 6:30 P.M., three hours and fifteen minutes after Mangouras and his crew felt the shudder from midships, the Vigo was only three miles away. Months later, in a statement he wrote for the European Parliament, Mangouras complained that the salvors on the Vigo could barely speak English and that they were keeping their distance until they received instructions from shore. But Spanish officials swore later that they'd heard the captain and his managers negotiating a better price for the tug that night, dickering for hours while his ship floundered in the waves.

At nine o'clock, with the price finalized, Mangouras and his skeleton crew of two ventured onto the open deck. They started inching forward toward the winch at the forecastle, more than two hundred meters across a slick and pitching ship, a journey that required nearly twenty minutes of cautious steps. But it hardly mattered: The winch, which would normally be used to secure a cable to the tug, operated on steam, and the boilers had died with the engines. Still, the two ships tangoed in the waves. The Vigo fired a messenger line--a light cable to steer a main heaving line--only to lose it in the sea or have it snapped by a swell. Seven times the tug tried to tether the tanker; seven times the lines broke.

And the storm raged on. The sea pounded the starboard side through the night, demolishing a lifeboat, a gangway, a section of catwalk. Each swell that charged toward the coast lifted the Prestige, rolled her, and carried her east, closer to shore. When the sun rose behind the mountains that hem Galicia against the sea and lit the gray sky silver and woke the villagers in Muxia, a tiny harbor just north of Cape Finisterre, the Prestige was just a few miles off the beach. She'd drifted more than twenty miles in the dark, washed in from beyond the horizon, limp and bleeding.

SERAFIN DIAZ REGUEIRO monitored the wayward tanker through the night, tracking her lurch toward the coast. He'd been on standby since eight o'clock the night before, several hours after the first Mayday, when his boss, the head of the port authority in La Coruña, told him there was a ship in distress off the Death Coast. Diaz was sixty-eight, with hair as fine and white as the spray of a wave and skin bleached and mottled by wind and sun, but still nimble and fit. And he knew ships, especially the big oil tankers. He'd built them, unloaded them, inspected them, taught other sailors the complicated mechanics of marine engines at the School of Advanced Merchant Shipping Studies. If the Spaniards decided to ferry their own technician out to the Prestige, Di­az would be the one to go.

An hour after dawn broke, the harbormaster told him the ship was still adrift, the captain hadn't been able to restart the engines, and the Rio de Vigo hadn't been able to secure a line. With the coast perilously close and the seas still heaving, someone had to get the Prestige under way, steer her back from the rocks. "Count on me," D­az told his boss. "It is my duty."

He was at the airport twenty minutes later, then up in a helicopter with five nervous Filipino crewmen. They flew southwest, toward Muxia, then swooped low and circled the hobbled tanker. Di­az saw the slick first, a black smear as wide as a highway, maybe as long, a streak wiped all the way to the horizon--twenty miles, maybe more. The helicopter came around again, and he scanned the hull. The breach at midships was monstrous. It didn't look as if the side had been punctured, but more as though an entire plate had peeled away, just tumbled into the sea to leave the innards exposed. He estimated that the gap was about twenty feet wide, but he couldn't tell how high it was because at least part of the wound was hidden beneath the waterline.

It was worse than he'd expected. The ship below him hadn't been damaged so much as it had simply fallen apart. And it was trailing oil like the skid of a giant tire. He had to get her away from the coast. Diaz buckled himself into a harness and stared down through the gale at the bow pitching below him. In all his years around ships, he'd never been lowered onto one from a helicopter, dangling at the end of a wire in the wind. His stomach tightened. He drew a breath and stepped into the air.

He spun once or twice on the way down and swayed with the gusts. His feet found the deck, slipped in the oil and water. He caught his balance, bent into a squat, unclipped the harness. The bridge was two city blocks away and bouncing, twisting with the swells. Di­az took two steps, felt a yaw, saw a wave about to break over the starboard rail. He stopped, braced himself, let the spray drench him, then moved again. Two more shuffling steps, like a duck. There was nothing to hold on to, nowhere to tie off a safety line. Another wave, another pause, two more steps.

He made the bridge twenty minutes later. He asked the captain how his ship had gotten in so much trouble, and Mangouras told him about the bang and the shudder and the list. Then he explained how he'd corrected the tilt by flooding the port tanks. Di­az bristled, a reflex. A mistake, he thought, an awful, critical error. A big ship like that, fully loaded, couldn't handle another six thousand tons of seawater in her holds. A better maneuver, he thought, would have been to shift the cargo, pump oil from the center tanks to the wings (an option Mangouras would later say he'd considered but found was not possible at the time). If Diaz had been captain, taking on more weight would have been his last, worst option.

Yet, Di­az recalled later, he held his tongue. Di­az had always found Greek sailors to be an excitable breed, swaggering and cocky. He had enough trouble without stirring up more. He asked to speak to the chief engineer. Mangouras told him the engineer was an experienced hand. Di­az thought he heard a defensive edge to the captain's voice. He nodded. Then the engineer told him the same thing when they were introduced, that he had years of experience. Odd, Diaz thought, two sailors boasting of credentials he hadn't questioned.

"Okay," Di­az said. "Let's take that experience and get the engines started."

The two of them, the engineer and Diaz, climbed down from the bridge to the engine room, eight levels through a rocking stairwell. At the bottom, Di­az's spirits brightened; he recognized the main engine, a MAN B&W, a fine machine and one he knew well. "Like a beautiful woman," he would say later. He looked more closely. Her beauty had faded, dimmed by neglect. He shook his head. "A sad woman." But she would still run. He hoped so, anyway.

Starting a tanker engine isn't as simple as turning a key or pushing a button. There are auxiliary engines that run the pumps for the fuel and oil and tanks of compressed air to balance the mixture. On a good day, on a properly maintained vessel, the process would take about an hour.

Di­az asked the engineer to switch on four pumps. "Impossible," the engineer told him. The pumps needed power from both auxiliaries, and one had been lost when the Prestige tipped to starboard.

DÃiaz tinkered with the dead engine. He got it to turn over, but it sputtered, died again. The engineer told him there was no fuel. Diaz traced the supply line back to a valve. Closed. He ordered one of the Filipinos who'd choppered out with him to crank it open. He fired the engine again, heard it catch, rumble to life. He glared at the engineer. The engineer stared back blankly, no bewilderment or anger or gratitude. Diaz felt a small shiver, the brief tremble of a man who believes he is alone in the bowels of a ship careening toward shore.

He told the engineer to fire the main engine. He refused, according to Diaz, insisted the auxiliaries needed to warm up. Diaz had a vision of the rocks off the port side, barely three miles away. There wasn't much time. He ordered the engine started.

Then another critical problem: The pressure in the oil pump was low. Diaz started a second pump and got the same reading. He went to the filter and discovered it was clogged. With one of the Filipinos helping, he cleared out the gunk, fitted the filter back into place. He told the engineer again, "Please switch on the engine."

Nothing. Diaz inspected the systems again, searching for the problem. He found it quickly: The valve from the air tanks, open when he'd checked before, had been twisted shut. Rage rose up from his belly. Sabotage, he thought. A clogged filter could be explained by the sloppy maintenance of an ill-trained crew. But the rest of the pieces--flooding the ballast tanks, haggling with the tug, killing the fuel to the auxiliary, shutting off the air--fell into place. They're trying to run her aground, he thought. They don't want to save the Prestige, don't want her to be inspected in a harbor, don't want to pay the salvors' bill. Instead, Diaz speculated, they might think it better to scuttle an obsolete ship and collect the insurance. Diaz would say later that he felt worse than alone; he felt outnumbered.

Hours slipped away. Each time Diaz believed the engine was ready to be started, he would climb to the bridge, give the order, then climb down again when the big B&W wouldn't turn. He would hunt through the machinery, find a broken component, jury-rig a repair, then climb back to the bridge. Just before three, almost five hours after he was lowered onto the deck, Diaz grabbed Mangouras by the arm. "The next problem I don't know about," he told him, "you go straight to jail."

"I am the captain!" Mangouras bellowed at him. "I am the captain!"

"Yes," Diaz said. "You are the captain. But only for the next five minutes, and then we're sending in a destroyer."

The main engine roared to life a few moments later. Mangouras asked Diaz not to rev it too high, afraid the vibrations from below and a hard charge into the waves would worsen the damage to the hull. Diaz told him to pick his speed but to set a course to the northwest. Slowly the Prestige turned into the waves, crawling through them at barely four knots, slinking back out toward the end of the earth.

IN A SMALL CAFE' ON A TINY WEDGE OF A HARBOR IN the village of Caion, fishermen waited out the storm that had raged for nearly a week. The weather had already taken money from their pockets; the last months of the year are when they pull a trove of sole and rays from the water, enough to carry them through the lean spring and summer.

They, too, had been monitoring the Prestige, at first with dread, then with terror when she stumbled nearer the coast, finally with cautious relief as she turned away. The Rio de Vigo managed to attach a line about the same time Di­az wrestled the engine to life, and between the thrust and the tug, the tanker was almost sixty miles off the coast by nightfall of the second day, November 14, when Diaz left the ship. A salvage crew boarded her early the next morning, and Mangouras killed the engines again to ease the vibrations, but by then a second tug was pulling the Prestige. The salvors turned her south again, wanting to tow her to a sheltered port, to get her to calmer waters where her cargo could be pumped to a sturdier ship and where the spillage would foul only one nook in Galicia's craggy coast. The Spanish authorities just wanted the Prestige farther away, at least 120 miles out, where any oil she lost might be carried away by the Atlantic currents. They sent navy ships to escort her, and late on the third day, when the salvors and the rest of the crew abandoned ship, they arrested Mangouras for disobeying their orders and threatening their waters, and a stern La Coruña judge locked him up on $3.2 million bail. The monster had been captured, the government told the Galicians, roped and tied and dragged back to the depths, barely bleeding at all.

The men in the cafe' believed that was true, wanted that to be true. There are only seven thousand people in Caion, and most of them live off the sea. They catch fish or sell fish or repair fishing nets or feed fishermen or rent rooms to the tourists who stroll the promenade above the beach and sun themselves on the sand between the boulders. If the Prestige emptied herself on this side of the horizon, the sea may as well rise up and wash the whole place away.

But then came the smell, blown in with the tide on the afternoon of the third day, a sulfur stink settling over the harbor notched into the cliffs. The men came out of the cafe' and stood on the wharf, and by then it was already there, black gobs creeping in with the waves. Heavy fuel oil doesn't float prettily on the surface the way gasoline spreads into a thin rainbow sheen. It clumps like hot tar, a sticky sludge. In the open sea, it floats below the surface, just deep enough so the booms can't catch it. Pushed onto shore, it piles upon itself, one greasy wave after another, up to a man's ankles, his knees.

The black tide ran all afternoon, and when it ebbed again, the oil stayed behind, an undulating goo nearly three feet deep. Along the beach, where the storm threw big breakers against the seawall, a black spume clung to the promenade and even to the white streetlights and, farther behind, to doorsteps and windows. In fingers all along the coast, oil seeped into estuaries where clams are raked and shallows where mussels are farmed. It rose up cliffs where goose barnacles grow and coated beaches where birds nest and choked rivulets that usually empty into the sea.

Fishermen did what they could. They went out in their boats and strung their nets behind them, trying to trap all that oil that the government had told them hadn't been spilled. They reached overboard and grabbed big globs of it, lifted it right out of the sea with their hands. Officially, the Prestige had lost only two thousand tons, less than 3 percent of her cargo, a droplet in the vast ocean. No one believed that, not out in the waves or ankle-deep on the beach.

And there was more coming. The Prestige was still creaking out to sea, waves battering her wounded starboard hull. Salvors warned that she was in danger of breaking up in the heavy seas, yet the Spaniards held firm. Portugal, too, denied her sanctuary. She was a pariah. The salvors prayed they could make Cape Verde, two thousand miles to the south.

On the fifth day, a huge ocean tug named the De Da steamed out to the Prestige. It attached a line to her stern and brought her around, turning her strong port side to the worst of the waves.

On the sixth day, she started to bend at midships, the bow and the stern cracking apart. The halves held together at 45 degrees for a while, then the old girl finally broke in two. At midday on November 19, just beyond a teeming underwater mesa called the Galician Bank, the stern dipped beneath the surface, then the bow, the two pieces drifting down into a darkening deep, then finally settling on the seabed more than two miles below.

IN 1961 A YOUNG German bohemian arrived in Galicia and promptly had his heart broken by a local girl. In grief he climbed down the rocks to the shore in Camelle, near La Coruña, built a little shack, and, as far as the locals are concerned, went mildly crazy. He stayed on the beach for decades, a hermit at the end of the world, carving stones into odd columns and building sculptures from the flotsam washed in by the tide. He'd been there so long that most people simply called him the Man, a funny, wrinkled character, naked except for his long gray hair and a loincloth.

The black tide killed him. When he saw it crawling onto the rocks, he wept in anguish. When it stayed and soiled everything around him, his old heart seized up with grief, breaking for his beautiful beach. Forty-two days after the first oil washed ashore, he died.

By the last week of November, oil covered the entire Galician coast, then moved beyond, slicking northern Portugal and southern France, a thousand miles, more if the measurement followed the contours of the inlets and coves. The fisheries were closed along most of the Iberian Peninsula because the water was so poisoned, but it hardly mattered because there was little to harvest. In Caion, the fishermen briefly thought they had witnessed a miracle when the fuel vanished from the harbor a few days after it arrived. But it had only been pulled out by an ebb tide to the shallows, where it sank to the bottom and smothered the crabs and coral. Six months later, mussels were growing again from ropes hung into the calm waters off Corme, but the big fish and the octopuses, chased away by the stench, still hadn't returned.

And the danger remained: tens of thousands of tons of heavy fuel oil in pieces of a tanker at the bottom of the sea. The Spanish authorities had gamely theorized that the tremendous pressure and frigid temperatures of the ocean depths would solidify the cargo, compress it into a sludge too dense to float. They were wrong. In the days after she went down, the Prestige lost 125 tons a day, 36,000 gallons rising up daily in slow columns. In December, a French submarine plugged more than a dozen holes that could be seen in the broken hull's exposed tanks, but that was only a temporary dressing. Six months later, there was talk of capturing the oil in submerged bags or entombing the wreck in concrete or, even more fantastically, pumping her cargo through a two-mile pipeline to a ship on the surface. In the meantime, oil continued to rise, up to a ton a day until late August, when the government announced that the remaining fissures in the broken hull had been sealed. An estimated fourteen thousand tons of oil remained inside. By September, there was talk of capping the entire wreck with a steel canopy to contain any further leakage. No one knew if any of the plans would work or precisely how many tens of millions of dollars each would cost.

The Prestige created the worst ecological disaster in Spanish history, yet no one has been held accountable, no one has been billed for the enormous losses and cleaning costs--estimated to be in the billions of euros. In the meantime, the owners of the ship and its cargo, and their respective insurers, have been left to fight among themselves over compensation for their lost assets.

Serafi­n Di­az Regueiro hesitates before he will talk about his hours on the Prestige, hesitates an entire day, and even then he won't discuss his orders, won't criticize or commend decisions made by politicians in Madrid. He is the harbormaster in La Coruña now, promoted shortly after the Prestige went down and his boss moved up the coast to the port of Ferrol, and he tells the story in his office overlooking the docks. Mostly he is dispassionate, staying hard to the undisputed facts, the times and positions and weather. Then he laughs at himself, at the fear in his gut when he dangled above the bow, at his clumsy duckwalk along a sloshing deck. Only when he gets to Mangouras does the rage seep out. "Sabotage," he says, and he knows it's a damning charge. "There was not a will to get the ship off the coast," he says. "The captain did not have the will."

By the account of the ship's owners and managers, as well as the would-be salvors, Mangouras acted bravely, staying aboard in a ferocious storm, wrestling his listing ship to an almost-even keel to minimize the spillage, pleading with obstinate Spaniards to give the vessel safe harbor. A hero perhaps, and then a scapegoat. The Spanish government arrested him and charged him with disobeying maritime authorities and harming the environment. He was locked away for eighty days and, once the Prestige's insurer posted his bail, forbidden to leave Spanish soil while he awaits trial. Mangouras has denied all the charges.

The Spanish government, meanwhile, has blustered, threatening to file lawsuits all over the planet. But who should pay? Who could pay? The ship's owner, whose only asset lies in pieces more than two miles down, whose official home is squirreled away in the legal backwaters of Liberia, whose liability will likely never be precisely proven because the evidence--the initially damaged hull plating--is scattered over dozens of miles of deep ocean floor? The managers, who are nearly as remote and slippery a target? The chartering company, buried in a foreign conglomerate and, in any case, guilty only of peddling bargain-basement sludge?

In May, the kingdom of Spain went after the American Bureau of Shipping, the society that certified the Prestige as seaworthy (and the most accessible legal target among the paper corporations and dysfunctional nations involved). Negligence, the kingdom claims in a suit filed in federal court in New York; the world's seafaring nations trust the ABS not to send a rust bucket out on the high seas. "Preposterous," the ABS answers; it is not an insurer, nor is it responsible for day-to-day upkeep. Spain wants at least $700 million (and its lawyers expect that figure to rise to more than $2 billion before the case goes to trial). In a separate suit, the Basque state wants another $50 million out of the ABS.

On the Galician coast, meanwhile, the fishermen and the environmentalists blame the government. They've taken their flag, a white field crossed by a blue stripe, and inked the background completely black, across which they've written Nunca mais--Never again. It is a ubiquitous symbol, taped onto shop windows and hung from balconies and carried by tens of thousands of marchers who swarmed through Madrid last winter, and it is about more than preventing another devastating oil spill. Galicia has always been Spain's stepchild, an isolated region where the modern motorway was built only five years ago and the average income is among the lowest in Europe. The Prestige episode--the optimistic fibs about the extent of the damage, the stubborn insistence on sending a crippled ship out to sea, the paltry handouts of forty dollars a day to sustain fishermen, the delay in sending soldiers and workers to help volunteers shovel tar from the sand--was merely a catalyst for generations of grievances.

But it will happen again. Out there, beyond the horizon at the end of the world, there are dragons and serpents and old rusting tankers and, way below in the deep, great heaps of black poison in aged holds being slowly crushed and corroded. Maybe it will burst out all at once, or maybe it will seep a few gallons at a time, but either way it will rise and blow in with the tide. There is nothing a fisherman can do except wait and clean up again and perhaps raise a toast to the inevitable gloom. In the bars on the coast, the men have taken to drinking a dark liquor called chupito de chapapute. It means "shot of tar," and it costs eighty cents.